1. Microseminars
  2. Re-Mix the Archive: Critical Race and Feminist Methods in Sound Studies

Microseminars

liner notes for the revolution by daphne brooks book cover
Course Number
HUM 597B

Re-Mix the Archive: Critical Race and Feminist Methods in Sound Studies

Credit Hour Info
1 Credit, C/NC
Instructor(s)
Michelle Habell-Pallán
Sonnet Retman
John Vallier
Meeting Location
Simpson Center for the Humanities, CMU 202
Meeting Dates/Times

Wednesdays, 2:00-3:30:
April 5, April 19, May 10, May 17

In connection with the seminar, students will attend Daphne Brooks’ Katz Lecture (May 9th) and the Sound Pedagogies Roundtable (May 11th).

Time Schedule
Time Schedule
American Ethnic Studies
American Studies
Interdisciplinary Research
Katz Lecture/Event

As an interdisciplinary field of research, sound studies explores the emergence and transformation of the concept of "sound" in modernity with an emphasis on the development of sound reproduction technology. Sound studies deploys a method of “listening in detail,” analogous to the practice of “close reading” in literary studies, to engage with the significance of sound in its material and cultural forms (Vazquez 2013). By listening in detail, sound studies makes audible “repressed histories of sound and listening, while situating the ear as a major instrument in the production of social, cultural, and scientific knowledge” (Steingo and Sykes, 2016). As the field has taken shape, scholars have called for a more expansive conception of sound studies, one that “listens in detail” for social relations of power within the field of sound and technology, tracking the ways individuals and collectives “transform, and are transformed by, sound, music, and . . . audio technology” (Nyong’o, 2014).

In response to this call, critical race feminist sound studies scholarship has ushered in an intersectional reconsideration of everything from overlooked historical actors to the role played by women in hardware development and sound recording, as well as the gender and race of the sensory and of perception (Kheshti, 2018). This course works in conjunction with spring quarter’s Katz Lectureship and Sound Pedagogies Roundtable to prepare graduate and undergraduate students to analyze sound in the archive.

It asks two broad questions: 1) what constitutes a sound archive and, 2) how do we produce knowledge through sound? This course draws upon feminist of color  sound studies and digital humanities to “explore how sonic experience might transform our scholarly networks, writing processes, research methodologies, pedagogies, and knowledges of the archive” (Lingold, Mueller and Trettien 2018). Students will become familiar with critical sound studies scholarship, focusing on the work of four vital feminist scholars: Daphne Brooks, Maureen Mahon, Gayle Wald, and Alexandra Vazquez. Students will also learn basic techniques for creating short interview podcasts, curating three-to-five minute podcast recordings.